But LA isn't all it takes to get a Pass B

Hi everyone.

I am enjoying these discussions too.  I must say that I agree wholeheartedly with Heath's arguments, in both his earlier and most recent post.   As a CELTA tutor of only three years' standing and a CELTA assessor of less than 1, it has been really interesting to read about all the different opinions people have about the CELTA course and the varied working environments/situations where the course is delivered and it does go someway to make up for the lack of 'group' standardisation.  I too miss being able to discuss the lessons/assignments with my colleagues.  Our team will sit down and do so once we have all finished the on-line standardisation though and just see where we meet - hopefully we will agree and if not we can openly discuss why we differed so that as a team we can ensure that are are all on same page for the future!

Personally, I find the CELTA criteria excellent and would compliment the original creators.  Yes, there are one or two rather obscure ones and others that could be expanded but it is hard to pin our 'art' down to 44 criteria and it can be frustrating at times to feel that the skill of teaching has become so 'prescriptive'.  However, as someone pointed out in a earlier mail, this has arisen presumably arisen for commerical/legal reasons.  We certainly benefited from this prescriptive criteria when faced with a formal complaint recently - the clear documentation and records in the CELTA 5 and feedback notes made our arguments and position clear.  As regards separating 2e into three separate areas - is this really necessary? When I have a candidate who is weak in one area or another I just write (2e- pron) or (2e - form), to make it clear which aspect of 2e they should focus on.

We do seem to have come full circle though with the discussion about criteria once again focussing on 2e - and candidates' ability with language awareness.  Although B grade candidates do and should display a greater awareness with language analysis both in planning and excecution in the classroom, that is not the only criteria which distinguishes them from a pass grade candidate.  We regularly have candidates who can analyse language very well on paper and even prepare and deliver some good concept checking questions in the classroom, but they do not achieve grade B because of a lack of consistent success with many other criteria.  Such candidates tend to 'explain' rather than 'elicit' , fail to grade their language explanations /teacher talk appropriately and have very little idea of how to create a student-centred classroom and all that entails.  There is a lot more to teaching than being able to teach grammar.

So ... the discussion goes on...

Kate

International House Buenos Aires

Jeff Mohamad on Pass vs Pass B being about LA

The list of criteria may be rather long but, as Steve Haysham mentioned, most of the items on it have been placed there because (some) trainers felt they were important. Naturally, some of the criteria are more important than others when it comes to grading trainees but I personally don't feel that the list needs any significant change.

In the center where I work we have always regarded a trainee's ability to analyze and deal with language well as being a/the key factor to examine when considering the award of a Pass B. This is also true of all the centers where I have assessed in the recent pass. The current system allows for this.

Before the criteria-based approach to grading was introduced, my personal experience was that some centers significantly underestimated the importance of trainees' language ability. It was not unusual for trainers to adopt their own idiosyncratic (often labeled as being "holistic") approach to grading and to award a Pass B to trainees who had good interpersonal and class management skills but little language awareness. "He's a good teacher," trainers would tell me when I assessed. "But is he a good language teacher?" I would have to ask. I find that I rarely if ever have to ask this question nowadays. So trainers seem to be managing to apply the grading criteria in a sensible and appropriate manner.

Incidentally, I don't feel that the course has become significantly more difficult over the years. In fact, I suspect that from the trainee's point-of-view it has actually become a little easier. Why? Centers are generally more organized than they used to be, they have better facilities and resources, there is more emphasis on pre-course preparation, coursebooks are easier to use, etc.
   
Jeff Mohamed
Cypress (nr. Houston), Texas     

-----Original Message-----

An interesting thought about the need for KAL in CELTA

Dear colleagues,
Rick Ansell has beat me to it and raised the ugly issue of the whole criteria system. I'm  fine with having a criteria-driven training course but find the number and balance of criteria rather frustrating.
Call me old fashioned but isn't there something about Language Teaching in the name CELTA ?
Which makes it a nonsense to have all the focus on language MFP condensed into our friend - criteria number  2e.  It's something like a trainee AA man having just one tick box for 'starting broken down vehicles ' among all the others for keeping his van clean and filling in little forms etc. Although,  like trainee teachers needing to have rapport , the AA man does need to be cheerful and friendly I guess!
Having worked with the award for over 20 years, I appreciate how it has become much tighter and we no longer give B's for  being vaguely stronger in language awareness , but the revamped 44 ( yes I counted when they first came out ... and lost the will to live in those first tutorials) criteria are totally unwieldy and to large extent irrelevant / unmeasurable as Rick and others have pointed out.
Most of you will remember the old CTEFLA criteria which broke down language into conveying  / checking meaning , focussing on form etc which made the new, all-in-one ( 2 e ) criteria  even more annoying . As an assessor and a tutor I find that the key area which makes a candidate a pass B rather than pass is the area of dealing with LANGUAGE , both in the planning  and teaching stages. It may be unfair, but surely this is what the certificate is very much about. Candidates with weak LA can and do learn about language on the job but I'm not convinced they they should get the pass B grading and the implication that they will be more independent in their first posting.
It's a huge issue - as the number of contributions to the debate on LA work has shown - so maybe we should focus energies on getting the criteria made more user friendly and with language as a key element.
Not sure if I'm a cat or a pigeon but with all this dialogue between trainers, perhaps it's time to convince Cambridge that it's time for a fresh look at the criteria !
Bill Harris

Bill Harris <bharrisefl@googlemail.com>  posted on the efl-celta-centres@lists.ucles.org.uk today.

Pre-lesson task

Would it be a good idea to, as well as providing follow up tasks to the lessons, to also give a short pre-lesson task.  This will necessarily have to be brief - they won't do it if it's going to take a lot of time, but perhaps something to give them some schema before you bombard them with information would be helpful.... Need to think about this.

Free introduction

One of the comments made in feedback on Saturday when I asked them if they would be willing to pay was that it would be good if a free introductory session was offered so that potential 'customers' could see what was involved.  I think this is an excellent idea, and could be a link on the website to a (short) recorded session, which was also available on YouTube.

Transmission vs collaborative learning

One of the things I'm noticing is that on-lin teaching is probably better suited to a transission model, or at least, that's where the balabnce more naturally sits.  It's easy to tell people things, but the pairwork is harder. This doesn't sit easily with me,  as it makes for a much more teacher centred classroom and I felt last night as if I were dragging them through it (another lesson to keep learning is to limit the amount of material.....

The main problem is that the breakout rooms are a bit isolated - you can't keep your eye on them in the same way that you can in a class, and it's less easy to see whether they are stuck/ finished etc. One of the suggestions from feedback was to put a timer on the breakout sessions, so that they knew when they were coming back.  I did this last night and I think it was a good thing overall, but one comment was that in one case, they were given too long (it was only 2 minutes...) for a particular task.  You can easily move between rooms to check out how they are, of course.  The difficulty when they don't have microphones is that the breakout rooms are laborious for them and difficult to quickly assess for me.  Hopefully, in the next group, I've emphasised sufficiently that they need a mic and they'll mostly have one...

Elluminate again

I tried Adobe ConnectPro again tonight and ended up giving up and going to Elluminate.  I think that this has to be the programme that I'll use, at least for the next course. It has it's drawbacks, but at least it works pretty reliably.  Two people haven't been able to log in and one had trouble with the sound - I guess that technical difficulties are always going to be the bind.

15 out of 22 trainees on this course have been to some of the sessions, so it's been more popular than I thought.  I haven't had a lot of written feedback from them, though (although I had some useful group oral feedback on Saturday.)

Scott Thornberry's Post on Focus on Form

In his absurdist, mildly funny novel Nowhere Man (Picador, 2004), Aleksandar Hemon describes a scene where the protagonist, a Bosnian, has applied for a job as an English teacher ('strictly out of despair') in an ESL school in Chicago. He is given a tour of the school, and visits an advanced class where there is a discussion in progress about Siamese twins:

"I must say," the man whom I recognised as Mihalka said, "that it is not perfectly pleasant when I watch them."

"They are monsters," said a woman in a dark, stern suit...

"They are humans," Mihalka said, then lifted his index finger, enunciating an important statement.  "When I had been a little child, I had had a friend who had had a big head.... Every child had told him about his big head and had kicked him with a big stick on his head.  I had been very sad," Mihalka said, nodding, as if to show the painful recoil of the big head.

"We are learning Past Perfect," the teacher said to us, and smiled benevolently...

"I must know Past Perfect," Mihalka said, and shrugged resignedly, as if Past Perfect were death and he were ready for it.

The scene nicely captures a number of the tensions that characterise interaction in the ESL/EFL classroom, not least the tension between, on the one hand, meaningful interaction ("Let's talk about Siamese twins") and, on the other, a focus on form ("Let's use the past perfect").

(Normally, of course, the focus on form is engineered by the teacher, not the learner. What's interesting, in this case, is Mihalka's dogged - if flawed - attempts to use 'the structure of the day'. Is this because he is conscious that the teacher's agenda is primarily form-focussed? Or is he the kind of learner who likes to try new forms out for size? Well, we'll never know.)

Just to remind you, a focus on form "overtly draws students' attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication" (Long 1991, quoted in Doughty and Williams 1998, p. 3). Typically, this might take the form of overt correction, or of gentle nudging, e.g. by asking for clarification, or by re-casting (or reformulating) what the learner has said. This incidental approach contrasts with the more traditional and deliberate approach, where teaching is based on a syllabus of graded structures (or forms), and these are pre-taught in advance of activities designed to practise them - what Long called (somewhat confusingly) a focus on formS.

A focus on formS (plural) entails the pre-selection and pre-teaching of discrete items of language (it is thus proactive), whereas a focus on form is essentially reactive, entailing "a prerequisite engagement in meaning before attention to linguistic features can expect to be effective" (Doughty and Williams, ibid. p. 3).   A focus on formS presumes a PPP methodology, where presentation of pre-selected and pre-graded items precedes production, and where it is assumed that fluency arises out of accuracy.  A focus on form, on the other hand, fits better with a task-based approach, where learning is driven solely by the need to communicate and where, as in first language acquisition, accuracy is late-acquired.

Focusing on the form of learner language that has emerged in classroom interaction is also a mainstay of the Dogme philosophy. As Luke Meddings and I point out (in Teaching Unplugged):

Focussing on learners’ lives means that the language that emerges in class will be relevant to them, but there is still work to be done if both you and they are to make the most of it. This is where a focus on form comes in (p. 60).

In our book, we offer some strategies as to how to exploit the language that emerges in classroom interaction so as to incorporate a focus on form, without sacrificing real communication. These include:

1.                  Retrieve what the learner has just said.  Otherwise it will just remain as linguistic “noise”. This might mean simple making an informal note during a speaking activity, or, at times, writing the learner’s utterance on the board.

2.                  Repeat it.  Repeat it yourself; have other learners repeat it – even drill it! Drilling something has the effect of making it stand out from all the other things that happen in a language lesson.

3.                  Recast it.  Reformulate the learners’ interlanguage productions into a more target-like form. This is not the same as correction. It is simply a way of indicating “I know what you’re trying to say; this is how I would say it”.

4.                  Report it.  Ask learners to report what they said and heard in group work. Apart from anything else, knowing that they may have to report on their group work encourages learners to pay attention to what is going on.

5.                  Recycle it. Encourage learners to use the emergent items in new contexts. This may be simply asking for an example of their own that contextualises a new item of vocabulary, or it may involve learners creating a dialogue that embeds several of the new expressions that have come up.

I'm now wondering: in the case of Mihalka, in the 'Siamese Twin' lesson quoted above, which of these - if any - might have been the most effective strategy?

References:

Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (eds.) 1998. Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press.

Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. 2009. Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching. Peaslake: Delta Publishing.

ESOL Teaching Skills Task Book

http://www.languages.ac.nz/table-of-contents-and-resources.html

This is a fantastic resource for post-celta trainees (and other teachers).  You should definitely recommend it.

A thought is that it would be a good idea to give a list of resources and possibilities for CPD after the course, including the Virtual Round Table conference, Russell's website etc etc.

This could be via links on your website, too.....

Elluminate

Went back to Elluminate tonight for the session.  Positives are that it works - no problems with breakout rooms or it freezing up as Connect Pro has tended to do.  Problems - two of my 'regulars' couldn't get in and another one got in but had problems.  I'm not sure whether this is because of the Java plug in or just some systems.  I can see a problem here for the future if I make this commercial - I'll have to make sure that it works before I take money off anyone!  In theory I've recorded the session, but I can't see where the recordings are stored - I'll have to work that out tomorrow.
Looked at clauses and realtive clauses - another lesson to learn is that this is really hard for them, and I need to go slower, in smaller steps.  I think that the distance makes this even more important......